After several years of development, swallowable wireless sensors are now ready to begin monitoring the human body. A tiny medical device sold by Buffalo, NY-based SmartPill has received approval by the Food and Drug Administration to be marketed in the United States. The electronic pill is meant to be ingested by a patient; it then gathers information about the digestive system as it travels through it, transmitting the information to a receiver worn by the patient.

The complete story here.

This workshop addresses issues related to the collection, management, processing, analysis, and delivery of real-time geospatial data using distributed geosensor networks (e.g. GPS receivers, micro-sensors for biological and chemical substance monitoring, geolocated still and video cameras). This represents an evolution of the traditional static and centralized geocomputational paradigm, to support the collection of both temporally and spatially high resolution, up-to-date data over a broad geographic area, and to use sensor networks as actuators in geographic space. These sensors can be static or mobile, and can be used to passively collect information about the environment or even to actively influence it.

The complete call for participation is available here.

As sensors become an integral part of most industries, their high-volume applications have increased their efficiencies of scale, thus in turn lowering prices and promoting adoption in other devices. Micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers, for instance, are ubiquitous in airbags and have recently started appearing in commodity hardware such as laptop hard disc drives. Also, as a consequence of the many natural disasters that took place during 2005, public focus is shifting from artificial blunders to natural calamities, thus creating considerable potential for smart sensors in environment monitoring systems.

The complete story here.

The September issue of the MISC newsletter is out. It has lots of useful information.

It can be downloaded here.

A new version of NesCT + OMNeT++ simulation environment is now available. OMNeT++ has a good GUI support, you can slow down or increase the speed of simulation at runtime. Even you can run your simulation until an event occurs or until some simulation time. This is very handy while debugging. You can see the overall view of the network, while the messages are being transmitted. With this, you get better grip of what you are doing. OMNeT++ is faster than TOSSIM, you may run your simulations for hours instead of minutes. You can mix different applications into same simulation. While one node may run CntToLedsAndRfm, the other may run TOSBase,RfmToLeds or Surge. Assumption of a homogoneous network is dangerous for real life applications. With the integration of MF (Mobility framework), you can run your simulations on a mobile testbed. You can assign some of the nodes to have mobility using a mobility model from various flavors. MF incorporates more accurate physical layer than TOSSIM. However, the radio included is an 802.11 radio. You can tune the parameters such as transmission range, speed, delay etc. so that it can model your existing WSN radio.

The project’s homepage is here.